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Welcome to 1% Better. A weekly newsletter where I provide simple playbooks to grow your following, earn more revenue, and live a more fulfilling life.

Today at a Glance:

• Why almost every creator needs to start a newsletter in 2024

• Your playbook for scaling a newsletter with all new techniques

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How to Build a Newsletter Business from 0 Subscribers in 2024

EVERY CREATOR NEEDS A NEWSLETTER

It’s the simplest, easiest, most straightforward digital business to get started, and has absolutely massive upside.

I was able to quit my job a year ago because of this newsletter you’re reading right now. You can monetize like me by taking sponsorships and selling products, or you can go the Morning Brew route and sell for millions of dollars. TONS of ways to make big money.

It doesn’t matter how small you are (I started my newsletter when I had 0 followers on X), you should get a newsletter set up.

By the end of this you’ll know the exact playbook I used to grow my newsletter from 0 to 30,000 subscribers, plus all the strategies to supercharge your newsletter business in 2024.

WHO SHOULD START A NEWSLETTER

Let’s start with WHO should start a newsletter: any creator who’s serious about starting a business who also enjoys writing.

That last part is important. A lot of people will tell you START A NEWSLETTER NO MATTER WHAT. That’s BS. If you are not interested in writing you are going to quickly burnout. I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times.

A creator who hates writing sees someone else with a newsletter business. They go oh I could do that too. They say they are going to send out a newsletter weekly. They send out their first one because they’re really excited and have that new venture dopamine hit. Second newsletter never gets sent because that dopamine hit faded and they realized they HATE writing.

To recap, if you have both of these requirements, start a newsletter:

1. You’re a creator

2. You enjoy writing

Perfect!

GETTING STARTED

First, we need to pick a newsletter platform. This newsletter was originally on Substack but I eventually moved over to Beehiiv. Substack was super simple and has a great network, but they take 10% of every premium subscriber. That’s not much at first but eventually ends up being a lot when you scale. So I moved over to Beehiiv because you keep 100% of what you make (you just eventually pay a monthly fee when you grow).

There is a free Beehiiv tier, so I’d recommend starting there. You can sign up for Beehiiv here. The other option is Convertkit, but that’s even pricier than Beehiiv and as a small business owner I’m trying to save on costs as much as possible.

Now that we signed up, it’s time to start writing.

This is where most people get stuck. What should they write about?

When I got started I didn’t know what to write about either. So I just took the biggest tech stories of the day and wrote about them. Took 5 stories and gave a 1 paragraph opinion on each. That’s it.

Then I’d hit send and it would go out to my subscriber list of 6 people (5 family members and my friend).

I did this every day for 6 months before I started growing.

Unless you’re a news curation newsletter like Morning Brew, I’m very against daily newsletters. I think overall people don’t like constant emails and don’t want to read personal stories from someone every single day. Even if you’re convinced your personal stories have ‘value’ I really don’t think anyone is interested in your life 365 days a year.

That’s why I recommend just talking about the news in your niche daily at first, then as you find your voice move to a weekly model and make that weekly email extra juicy and valuable.

Writing daily about the news at first will be huge for getting you into a routine and making you a better writer.

SCALING

The old strategy of scaling was putting the link to your newsletter in a 2nd tweet attached to all your tweets.

This strategy is dead and no longer works.

It’s been incredibly diluted and now everyone is doing it on X. Most people I talk to find it incredibly annoying and cringe when every single tweet is shilling a newsletter.

Here’s the updated strategy for 2024:

Strategically link to your newsletter from X. As in write a tweet about something you talk about in your newsletter, then a couple hours later, attach a 2nd tweet that says something along the lines of “This subject is super interesting and I have a lot more to say about it. Click here if you want to see why I think this will TOTALLY change:”

An example would be me posting on X “Everyone needs a newsletter! It’s the ultimate way to start a digital business.”

Then 2 hours later replying to that post with: “If I have you convinced, I laid out my entire playbook for starting a newsletter here:”

Instead of shoving your newsletter down people’s throats over and over again after every tweet, you are strategically plugging your exact article at places where it adds to the original point you are making.

This is a way to add value with your newsletter, rather than just spamming it and becoming a newsletter salesman.

If you keep doing this long enough and strategically plugging in the right spots, you should see some healthy growth on your subscriber list over time.

MONETIZATION

In the starting and scaling phases of your newsletter, you should not care about monetization.

You don’t want to lessen the quality of your content by including ads or spam.

As you scale though, you’ll start getting opportunities to monetize.

The simplest monetization method is a premium newsletter. With Beehiiv or really any newsletter service, it’s very easy to turn on a premium newsletter, set a price, then start sending out extra content to your most hardcore fans. When I started I’d send out a bonus newsletter every Saturday that included AI prompts.

The great part about this is, a lot of people will sign up for your premium newsletter right off the bat for no reason other than they just want to support you.

Premium newsletters are also great because they don’t cheapen the quality of your product with advertisements.

Once I got to 5,000 subscribers, I started selling advertisement slots.

Companies organically started reaching out to me and offered to buy slots in my newsletter.

I started by selling them for $300 each, then slowly increased the price over time as I got more demand. Just make sure you put a line in your newsletter at the top saying you are willing to take on sponsorships.

Next, and probably the most high upside, is selling products.

Your newsletter is the most powerful marketing channel you have. Once you’ve built your subscriber base, you can start creating digital products and plugging them in your newsletter.

For me I try to make this non abrasive, so I put a small plug at the end of every newsletter about what my latest product is (right now I’m preparing for the relaunch of my community (link)). But you can easily create courses with Kajabi or ebooks with Canva.

Boom, this is newsletter growth 101 in 2024. If I were to start over again right now, this is literally EXACTLY what I would do.

Let me know if you have any questions! Happy to answer any DMs you guys send to me.

Find this content helpful? My mastermind community is completely relaunching on May 9th. It’s going to change everything.

Looking for a community of people to learn from? Looking for accountability partners to make sure you stay focused? Looking to learn everything there is to learn about content creation on X?

In one month my private community The 1% Club is completely relaunching on a new platform with a new brand. It’s going to be 1000x more value packed. This will be the PREMIERE community for X creators.

At the moment it’s called The X Growth Mastermind.

Previously the community was a weekly call where we’d discuss content strategy.

Now it’ll be:

• Multiple weekly calls
• An online hub filled with exclusive video and written content
• Multiple courses and mini courses including my X Growth Masterclass plus a brand new X Algorithm Masterclass
• A library of recorded calls with the community
• Content reviews and feedback session

Plus the options for:

• 1 on 1 calls
• Personal content reviews
• Monthly progress reports

If you’re a content creator on X and are looking to learn and grow, this is the only community you’ll need.

If you’re interested in getting on the waiting list and getting an exclusive discount off the price, feel free to fill out the form here.

Will be sending out a ton of new information in the next week. This is by far the most exciting product I’ve ever launched and I can’t wait for you to see it.

Questions or feedback? Feel free to reach out to me on X.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Alex